


in the storm we were born to ignore

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, POV Second Person, Pre-Kerberos Mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-09 10:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11667528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: Every day, you wake up in a new body. A body that isn't yours. For twenty-four hours, you will carry a stranger's name and memories and hopes.It's always been like this.





	in the storm we were born to ignore

You wake up.

From touch and taste, it's shaping up to be a yellow-haunted day. Yellow's a crumpling stripe down the beige of your jacket when you roll to a side, when you stretch; yellow seeps through the cracked blinds like oil. Your tongue's furred yellow, clumping and smudging the insides of your teeth when you swallow. The cot shrieks as you tumble back and every bone in you locks, rigid; bells swing and crack inside your fraying skull. You lie like a mannequin counting down to its dismemberment. 

Ray by ray, yellow filters out of the world. A merciful silence drapes over your skull.

"Morning," you mutter after the echoes settle, a croak to empty air and the spat-plaster ceiling. "I guess."

Memory flicks a card through the quiet: the room's too big, blocky with furniture. Another bed for another body. Your bunkmate must've bludgeoned his way out the door without you. Hours ago, probably. That's pretty typical, too.

On any morning, getting up's a stop-motion tragedy. Today's worse. You roll your shoulders, testing the ache; sandpaper pressure rasps your spine, scrapes up through your skull and dissolves. Still: _get up_ , and you do, body creaking from the roping sheets to the bathroom. Faucet, toothbrush, a tinny paste-flecked mirror on the beige-tiled walls. Your teeth flash white even through foam. Male, seventeen. Dark hair, dark eyes, heavy lashes like wicks in a candleboned face. Habit hooks your mouth into a thick sneer; your snub nose crooks with a once-broken jag, not quite set. Twig wrists wrapped in yellow rags. It's not a build for digging trenches, not with these matchstick bones, these straight and scarless arms powdered with gleaming thin hair.

Back in your square little dorm, the bent blinds skew to one side, swaying to the broken plastic lock. You tip onto your toes, haul at the cord like a sailor pulling a sail up into a new wind. Late afternoon light comes bristling through, and memory trickles in with your squinting. You're a cadet at something called the _Galaxy Garrison_. You belong to it, jacket and boy alike, and you hate it. You hate the cafeteria's narrow range of chem-sour aftertastes; the squeaky cot; the way your roommate hitches every other snore like an accent; the thundering adrenaline that throttles your lungs when the little planes swoop into flight. _Hate_ is the only word—a choking grit that locks your fingers against the chair, chisels its fury into your bones. 

You've decided to leave three times this week. Today could be the fourth.

You're not very good at what you do. 

It's the wrong thought— _I hate this_ storms through you, a frenzy dizzy enough to roil through the back of your throat—but that's your-thought-not-yours. You have to know the difference.

Close your eyes. Breathe: in and out, in and hold. Breathe until your circulatory system settles into auto and real memory comes reeling back. Yours, and not yours.

Your name's Keith, but they won't call you that today. No one will.

On better days, you'd dream of choices. Sift your options again, think yourself over. There are ways and ways to deal with a hideaway life like yours. You could fall in step with a stranger; with raw skinned knuckles, you could clasp a teacher's sleeve. Stop someone who won't know any better; tell them that _Keith_ 's a childhood nickname you never outgrew. Tell them you used to look a little different: shorter, taller, scrubby hair, sharp elbows and grit blackening under your nails. Ask them to look at you for those signs, just for a little while—look at these unfamiliar limbs and this masking face like you're someone else, someone real—

No.

Instinct twitches through your nerves. With muscle and tendons tuned to long habit, you tug your collar straight, smooth the sleep-seamed furrows from your borrowed jacket. Your glance lashes over the windowpane. "Shut up," you tell your ghosting, black-eyed reflection, and that's habit too: thick lips pinching against the current of an ugly, drowning thought. 

Your lips. Your ugliness. You, Garrison boy. You.

Today, it seems, you're going to hate yourself. But you're used to that.

Every day, you wake up in a new body. A body that isn't yours. For twenty-four hours, you will carry a stranger's name and memories and hopes. You know this cycle to your core, the same way you know how some memories strike sparks across the backs of your eyes, or the count of your pulse, the fleeting prickle down your spine when someone says _Keith_. There's a living breach between the body you wear and the person you are.

It's always been like this.

# *

  
The name they'll be calling you for the day is Akira— _Cadet Akira_ , a nameplate made for filing and forgetting. The Galaxy Garrison takes hundreds of applicants every year; its cadets wash out with every season in tides. Somewhere in the debris of his history, Cadet Akira scrawled himself into a contract, sold his life to public service—and so here you are: a ghost wearing his unsteady bones, aching with yesterday's exhaust, half-named and meaningless. Government-stamped and Garrison-forged, your origin story like a footnote weaving off a page. To a military project, the surname of an unproven pilot's only rubble.

At least that gives you less to remember.

You don't make it a habit to live the lives of your hosts better than they do; that's not your business. But Akira's hangover keeps worrying at you like an old dog: its teeth scrape into your skull, grinding down memory, color, thought. A stumble gets you from cot to desk; wrung out, you lock both hands over a rickety chair, gulping down nausea in mouthfuls. You can't stop, can't slow. It's 1650, and Akira has a timeline: a meeting on the tarmac at 1700; dinner in the cafeteria before 2100; a nightflight simulation at 2130; a standing appointment as a human garbage chute, courtesy of yesterday's half-drained grocery vodka, still tucked between his cot and wall. You probably have half an idea of what any of those mean.

Great.

Out you trudge on Akira's soured, slouching stride: through the narrow linoleum halls, steps pounding to match all your sullen aches; down three flights of stairs in a slump and through the dented, sticking door—into desert air and the cadets' practice runway.

Outside, the dusk's gone hazy, cataractic across the open tarmac; summer's battered the horizon to a sliver, a stripe of light crushed beneath the weight of sheer, inviolate color. The sky's a stretched flare, firelight through a hollowed sapphire. Its heat pries into your pores, coaxes every twinge and ache in your muscles into pounding; its airless shimmering bleaches the bitter off your tongue. 

Your first step's like treading water. Yesterday's vodka blares beneath your eyelids in a grainy flash. Fists in your pockets, you totter across the black, spine locking against the heat surging up through your bootsoles. Overhead, some red-winged flyer's wheeling lazy circles through the deepening haze, a lurid, aging dragonfly without aim or ambition. Even levels below, you hear the grumbles and shuddering of its steering, the disgruntled puffs of an engine which dreams of rust and retirement. Akira's mechanical twin, its sulky hour come at last, noisy with the grinding chorus of a machine that hates its work; but even with Akira's raw eye, you can't miss the level, unwavering line of its flight, smoothed out by its pilot's sure, guiding hand.

Whoever he is, he's good.

Some signal must spark out from the landing. Down the red flyer comes, a gentle skimming that settles with hardly a bark of wheel over asphalt and curves along the runway's end. From the pilot's seat, a figure stretches up, bareheaded and rueful. He scrubs down his tufting hair before he swings himself from the open seat, jumps down. His frame flexes broad and sure as stone beneath the taupe uniform, his skin flashes with desert gold. Akira's throat stutters on dust; you swallow through the sudden drought.

Something must give you away—some scrape of your bootsoles or a heartbeat's stutter. The pilot turns; his eyes light on you, and he quirks a smile. "You must be my 1700," he says, easy. "Hey. I'm—"

"The remedial instructor," you say, with Akira's tensing nasal hum. "I know. You don't have to explain preboot to me."

"Preboot?"

Akira despises him already, the brimming gold of his slow smile all unmilitary sweetness. Hate churns your veins like adrenaline; your fingers spider against your thighs, shiver and knuckle against the body's memorised impulse to grind them into your pockets. "When you make it into the Garrison, they take you through boot camp," you say. It's too loud, even for a distraction; you curl in on yourself a little, instinctive, your too-wide jacket puffs higher around you, rumpling yourself small as you cross the asphalt. "When they start thinking about kicking you out, you get the _pre_ boot treatment—last-chance training before they boot you."

The instructor cocks his head; a lock sways between his brows. "Huh. _Pre_ boot until you _de_ camp. Is that the idea?"

You glare.

He scratches at his ridiculous military buzzcut. Even his nails are pared, neat and gleaming. "Sorry," the instructor says. That, at least, curls soft with rue. He has a warm polish to him, bright enough to wear like a medal. "I guess it's not a good time to lighten the mood. Look, cadet—I don't know why you applied to the Garrison. But you must've come here for a reason. I've looked at your scores: they aren't top-flight, but they're not bad enough to wash you out. If you want to stay, you have a place."

It roils in your stomach. "The Garrison's not big on _chances_ ," you tell the crumbling asphalt. "I'm here to fly something. You're going to tell me if I pass or fail. That's kind of the end of the story."

"Easy. I'm here to put you through your paces. See what you can handle before I make any recommendations on your lesson plan going forward. That's all."

A liar, or a bureaucrat: someone who eats up his agency's papered nonsense and chokes it out again by the page. A reel of cadet's rumors spins white-hot at the back of your skull; Akira knows already how this is going to go. "Keys," you say. The instructor's brows snap high; but he slings the ring to you and you snatch it out of its jangling arc.

Steel dents flesh. A beat, recollecting: Akira's still lead-boned on a cheap hangover, a boy like a spark jumping between a cigarette and a short-fuse—but he's sharp-eyed and quick with his hands, faster than anyone you've been before.

Time to test your limits.

You shoulder past the instructor to the little red plane. Your boot thuds off the front wheel in a lazy kick before you lift your eyes to clamber over the red-shelled top and swing into his abandoned seat.

Below, the instructor raps a rust-pocked wing, wincing with his smile. "Was that really necessary?"

"Loose stones," you say, smart-mouthed on another boy's memory, like every cadet wasn't drilled on slipstream damage on their first day. You lean over, drum the wheel's arch. "Are you just going to watch from down _there_?"

"You're making me feel unsafe, cadet," the instructor says; but he strides to the passenger side, obedient, climbing through the slack-jawed frame to drop into the seat. "A little judged, too."

"The Garrison's not the only one that can make an eval," you say, and he laughs. The dusk's cooling, spilling gold down the console between your hands. The air's easy; the night could be. But Akira knows himself—his black moods and trembling wrists, the weight of the stashed bottle shining deep in his mind. He knows himself the way a butcher knows the body on his counter: he's not a pilot, and never has been. An open sky only means a longer fall, and his body's rusted with aches already, always shaking, shaking with the constant dread which swells and roils in the pit of his belly. He can't do this. You can't.

 _Stop. Just get this over with,_ and your grip locks over brake and steering, stiff and unsure. There's always a trembling, uncertain beat when you reach for unfamiliar memories, the kind wired into brain and not bone—but not this time. A blink, and the cockpit console thunders through you in a rote list: control yoke, rudder pedals, throttle controls, gust lock switch, actuator control module, every name sure and real, rooted as if to your core.

Left to your own loose end instincts, you wouldn't know what to do. But Akira, cowardly and still half-drunk, does.

"Engine starting check," the instructor reminds you, and you swing him a dead-eyed glower. He'd landed the plane bare heartbeats ago; the seat's still radiant with his warmth. The starting check's the least of what matters—but it's your fingers curling now. In an unflinching sequence, you switch the interal cockpit lighting, check the rest of the instruments in a mechanical routine, all certainty. _Flaps off, trim set for takeoff, carburetor heat at cold, power brimming_ —jargon cracks through you and you snap through each line. Between arrogance, instinct, and Akira's memory, you know this plane better than you've known the back of any hand you've ever raised. 

It'll be Akira's triumph tomorrow. Right now, this is yours.

"You're moving through this pretty quick," the instructor says as you flip the next switch—but he's wasting breath, the words beating quiet and unconcerned. Beneath all that caution burns the instinct that every pilot has to understand—there's no way he wants you to listen.

At either side, the turbines are warming again, waking into a promising purr. Your eyes flash over dials and gridded screens, gauging fuel and waiting for the trembling dials to still. "Confirming engine RPM above 2700. Can we _go_?"

Your instructor—an obvious drama school reject with his neat hands and his king's solemn jawline—sighs. "If we were in any other program," he says, snagging a seatbelt, "you'd have to go through a checklist about complying with local regulations on taxying in the tarmac area. But for now, let's just see where we should start." He cocks his head. Behind him, the horizon flares as if on jet fuel; its filtering light paints gold down the nape of his neck, his tugging smile. "It's Akira, right?"

You shrug, just the way Akira would. "Whatever," you say, and it's smoke in your lungs. The plane's thrumming alive beneath you, better than memory, steadier than any drumming heart. Akira hates this exercise, has always hated it; but hatred's an intimacy all its own, etching its acid into your bones.

"This course tends to give people some trouble," he says. "Why don't you just take it slowly for me? Let's drive a straight line just down the runway."

You stare. Without looking, your hands click over five controls. The little flyer creaks to life; you roll down the centerline like a grandmother pacing out to fetch her groceries.

"That's still a little fast," the instructor says, after a dry stretch. "But I get the point. Take her off ground. We'll fly through Track A-57—it's the first one in the cadet manual—"

But you're _going-going-gone_ by the time he's started rattling through the rote safeties. Sequence after memorised sequence bristles away its rust, scorching behind your eyes. You take the flyer through a lazy curve over the asphalt; there's a headwind whistling overhead, all invitation. You twist, careful, centering the plane's nosewheel against the runway's centering line. The rest comes as if by habit: keep the throttle smooth. Aileron left in neutral as a pump rolls the elevator control back. Thrust-line parallel to the ground as you charge forward. A wheel stutters, catching gravel— _shoddy sweeping, what kind of cadets do they keep around here anyway?_ —but you're already dialing through the next sequence. A little quake rolls through the flyer's framing; the drag bruises, but you're braced for that, setting wings level with the aileron controls.

The moment comes: wheels grating concrete, raking up-up- _up_. You accelerate.

The earth drops out beneath you as you spin up through the singing air. The Garrison's crumbling already under the heavy dusk, prison to island to ghost; as the last of its office lights dims into scattered blinking, you steady the plane into an even flight. The instructor catches your thought before you voice it. His brows twitch, but he nods.

The air thins out. Summer's stripped away the clouds, left the winds gasping over the shuddering wings. With an easy hand, you take the flyer wheeling through the same measured spirals that you'd seen him run. Slow at first, then into tightening circles. 

"You're allowed to _go slow_ ," the instructor says after the third turn—but his voice rings with a skipped beat when your glance snaps over his seat. You could loop the hitch of his breath for hours, listen yourself into a stupor. Akira's nerves are fraying with it like he knows no better, like he'll never learn.

"I think you can take it," you say instead. He gets three control-adjustments' worth of warning before the flyer wrenches _down_ , goes barreling into a nosedive.

You pull up at the last heartbeat; your flight skims across the ground by hairs, rattling gravel and into the thinning air he _shouts_ , a blaze of unrelenting joy that whips away beneath the flyer's rattling wings as the world skews and floods with the last of the desert light. 

_Higher, higher._ The flyer straightens out again, humming parallel to the trembling horizon, its turbines spinning a lurid, ceaseless chorus. Turn after perfect, curving turn.

"All right," the instructor says, after a stretch. Beneath his streamlined voice, you can still hear a molten note. "Let's take her down again. Let me know if you need me to—"

"I'd ask Jesus to take the wheel before I asked you," you say, and it's Akira's venom running dry on your tongue, a joke to share. The wind's streaming through the open frame; your veins are electric on adrenaline, your knuckles cinching like you could anchor this dusk, this moment, this heartbeat into place with your bare hands.

The instructor makes some sound, faint but not unkind; he nods his surrender.

Trust's a question, and you answer it. The turns have left you flying crosswind, so you drag over the console anew, banking just enough to ease into the glide down. The engine grumbles as the plane tilts, adrenaline sinking into drowsy tedium; even a plane knows when it's being babied. "Airspeed under elevator control," you say, for the instructor's benefit as much as Akira's. Tomorrow's closing in; by dawn, you'll be gone, but you can at least give Akira this. "I think the wind's picking up—I'm gonna throttle the rate of descent a little."

The instructor gestures, still flushed underneath all his gilding. "Impress me," he says.

Passengers and cargo, Akira's memory drones, prefer a float period, that giddy suspension where a plane coasts towards its standstill like a cradle pressing into a warm hand. "Incoming," you say, and brace down as you steer onto the runway. The flyer's wheels clack and rattle, grinding smooth before you skew together into a neat full stop.

Silence.

A thud shakes the night; the instructor's struck back against the headrest. Into the dark he _shouts_ : seismic, electric, surprised. At once he's leaning over to clasp your arm; the sunset's burned low, but his eyes hold like sunstruck glass, spilling over with all the daylight lost to the horizon. "I thought you were supposed to be _bad_ at this," he says.

His hair's rumpled again, his mouth brilliant with a new flush, his starched collar splaying out, reframing the jut and bow of his throat. Reflex clenches the wheel. Day after day, and you can't remember when anybody's ever looked at you like that—you or the promise of you. Nobody's talked to you with that voice, a sound that's got galaxies caught in his teeth, still hoarse with the thunder of inhuman flight. Akira's reflex crackles down your nerves, matching yours: don't let him straighten his collar. Don't let him go. Keep looking. Don't stop. "I—"

"I'll get you the write-up; you can talk to your instructors about doing makeups on every assignment you've missed—but I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell you that. Can you meet me tomorrow? Something's," he laughs, sheer shock thrilling up his lungs, "going seriously wrong in your classes if they're keeping you at the bottom ranks."

"Why wait?" 

Too loud, too soon. The light of him cuts out; his answer stops. Still you go on, words barreling out of you in shots. "Let's go somewhere now."

 _Somewhere_. It hangs and curves in echoes. Too slow, the instructor scrubs a palm over his hair—a clumsy tell, an excuse. You were stupid to remind him that there's a world past the little plane, anything outside your sure hands on the controls and his fists locked along the seatbelt. "Go somewhere," he echoes, and his mouth smoothes to a diplomatic line. "Akira—you still have drills. I got you excused from evening workshop for this session, but that still leaves your nightflight simulation in four hours. I've got office hours tomorrow, if you want to—"

" _No._ " Too forceful, and his gaze's filtering into a different kind of brilliance, joy stripped out for curiosity—and the worst part's knowing: there's nothing you can say that will get him to understand. With care, you unravel your grip from the steering—plant your fists in your lap. "It has to be now. Come with me, and I'll ace any simulation they throw at me tonight."

His eyes hold yours. It isn't the look of an instructor evaluating a student, not now; you're a book he can't read, a screen gone blank. "What if I don't?" he says, not quite unkind. "You won't get yourself kicked out of the Garrison just to make a point about a night off."

You know that undertone, thin as an engine's purr. _You_ , he says, and means: not someone who flies like you do.

"You don't know me," you say, low and deliberate. "Instructor."

Overhead, the constellations are spilling and frothing through the floodplain night. Still he's looking at you, breath after breath, holding onto some center unseen, the staring eye of a storm. "I guess not," he says, "but it's starting to feel like I should. What did you have in mind?"

# *

  
Cars aren't Akira's specialty either; but a driver only needs to track three controls. It's nothing after the red flyer's wild spread of dials and levers and lit green screens. You keep your head down, the recalcitrant cadet, while the instructor talks his way into a late-lit office to sign out one of the Garrison jeeps; you make it five miles out of the garage before you tell him to pull over. The instructor flicks up his brows—the same look he'd worn when he'd named a track for you to test. The wheels crunch onto gravel; the locks flick open.

In the driver's seat, you circle every dune along the state road; you glower at the flashing speed limits and match them to a hair as you whirl into town. The roadmarks ribbon by. As gravel melts to asphalt, he points out the little sights down the way: winding sidestreets and grey, abandoned shopwindows, a drenched, splintering piano flaking silver outside a crowded sports bar. He laughs at your face, a startled shameless burst, as he coaxes you to park in a cramping gap between two pick-up trucks on a narrow one-way lane. "Over there," he says, and that's how your night goes, shepherded into the gauzy neon lights of a _theme diner_.

Inside, the air conditioner's churning out cold by the tide; its fans spin with the reek of disinfectant, onions, and grease. Curving booths circle little round tables, plasticine and gaudy as candyfloss; the floor's a checkering of tiles and etched Hollywood stars, every sconse lined with chrome. They've crammed the walls with color—lintels, mantels, everything. Bug-eyed alien stickers patch one over the other across the counter, and beneath the sleek countertop stretches a mural of soundless records, powdery prints of a man with slashing cheekbones and neon-traced eyelids, posters blazing THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. A dead-eyed waitress swans by as you slide into the farthest booth. She stares at the instructor with mollified disbelief, antennae swaying from her headband, but bends an ear to his murmured order before she snaps away again.

At least the food, when it comes, looks like something harvested off this planet.

You don't mean to talk, and then you do. It's less about the conversation than it is the tide of his voice, articulating new sights and names. _Just Shiro's fine,_ your instructor says, rubbing at his nape. _Though it's Takashi Shirogane, if you have to ask for me when we get back_. He's long graduated, but still running remedial lessons for the fumbling cadets. Earned a commendation in his second year. No taste in machines whatsoever.

"A Jeep is sturdy," he says, though it's not quite stern as he spritzes some nameless red sauce across his fry plate. "That tends to come in useful in the military."

"We're called the _Galaxy Garrison_ ," you say. "Sturdy's not going to help if all the pilots die of old age before they get to the outer limits."

"If you're thinking about taking the Red Arrow out again in your spare time, I have some bad news about its flying capacity."

You roll your eyes to the ceiling tiles; even these, you see too late, have been splotched with glow-in-the-dark galaxies. "Forget that," you say, as if a command could smother the wellspring of bad jokes brimming between his ribs. "Why'd you even bring that thing out?"

Your instructor nods as he works through his own mouthful, a quiet signal: _wait for it._ He swallows, sweeps a thumb along his lip for crumbs. He's a string of neat gestures, easy to please but sparing with his hands. It's just as well; your shoulder burns still with the impact of his palm, body warmth spilling through cloth, radiant. "The Red Arrow's standard issue for training. It's a little slow for the army, so the Garrison has them on loan. I'll admit that they're not the greatest for maneuverability—but it's a tradeoff. Clunky tends to be better for beginners. We don't want pilots to go out after training, expecting all machines to give them the kind of speed that they can get out of our best."

"You're training people to pilot _down_ a couple levels from what they should be able to do. That's dumb."

Some faint joke twitches at his brows, comes to roost at the corners of his mouth before it ghosts through and evaporates. "You can always drill new moves into a good pilot," he says. "It's a lot harder to train bad habits out. In theory, putting you to work on an outdated machine's supposed to help you learn to sense and compensate for faulty machinery. Anything can go wrong when you're in the air; the sooner you learn to adapt as much as possible, the better you can fly for the Garrison."

" _Supposed to._ "

Your eye catches his; his smile breaks to light.

"I do see your point. Actually," he ducks a little over his plate, "you reminded me—I've made that argument before. If the Garrison wants to see the best that its cadets can offer, it needs to give them the chance to prove themselves."

"And no one listened to you." Your arms cross, but your brows twitch up. "Are you sure you're in the right job?"

His mouth crooks with a familiar pull. "You ask a lot of trick questions." He shrugs. "To be honest, it's not like the Red Arrow's a _bad_ model. They've held up a lot longer than some of the prototypes they used when I first entered the program, and that wasn't even that long ago. I take a couple evenings off every week to test them and keep them running. They should be in decent shape for training."

"You sound like the Garrison handyman."

Years have boiled Akira's voice down to clips and snaps, harsh as a raven's call—but there's a question beneath the sting, and you mean it. These lines don't fit _Takashi Shirogane_ ; there's a gap between his golden reputation and these careful measuring hands, the easy way he emptied out his schedule for a late dinner at a cheap town diner. Garrison supervisors should be crowding through his door, pressing him into the astronaut walk machines, training him on asteroid simulations to school him on life without gravity. He should be falling asleep in the simulation machine with his fingerpads moulding each button on the panel. He could be back at the Garrison still, easing some ancient machine out from the complex garages just to see how they spin through the dark, and instead he's stealing a wizened black runt of a fry off your plate.

It might have been the worst fry on your plate, but it was still _your_ fry. In vengeance, you sight him, one-eyed, to flick a crumb from the plate into his collar: just desserts for any poacher. At once he's clapping a hand to his throat—but he laughs, too. "All right," he says, as you settle back in lounging victory. "To answer your question—I like making sure that the right things get done. Speaking of which—" he motions with a fry of his own, "finish your milkshake." 

_Hate_ —but that's Akira's unforgiving scruples baring old teeth, his temper and his leftover bitterness. How easy it must be to look at things as the Garrison's darling: the world simplified to the kinetics of repairs and moving parts: things that move and things that should.

Akira's malice, but not yours. Your mouth sets. You lift your straw, skimming the froth, and blow through a sputter of bubbles. He snorts. "Very nice."

You swallow against the cold. "You put an _egg_ on your fries. With some weird mystery sauce. I don't think I have to take that from you."

"Is that another judgment? Because it sounds like you're _egging_ me on," your instructor says, wide-eyed—but the mask cracks into a yelp when you stoop over the table, vulture-quick, swipe your own fry cleanly through a sunny splotch of unbroken yolk.

You eat, pay, and go hurtling out of the diner together for no reason that you will remember later. Only the momentum stays: the way you tumble into the jeep's stiff seats and sweep out through the new gap left by the vanished truck, trailing into a dusty night with a radio crackling showtunes. Reason won't matter, only that it was a moment, a madcap impulse—only that you throttled up to seventy on the state road and saw his grin cut white, white through the filtering light. Pulling him out to play hooky, it turns out, was a lot harder than it is to keep him with you—inertia in action. You wind past every dune again, curving back through fractal infinities, fast and faster, fit for flying; he laughs again when your fingers jerk to roll aileron controls that no car would have.

In the end, you stop at the dunes ten miles out from the Garrison. This has less to do with stargazing than, the instructor swears, a sweep of wild goats which thunder past to the horizon every night.

"Goat." You lift your brows as he teeters on the bluff's crumbling edge to consider the drop. "You know, this is a desert, not a farm."

"I might," the instructor says with dignity, "be spending all my time around planes, but I still know what a _goat_ looks like. Just trust me, all right?"

 _Trust_. Funny how a single word works such savaging alchemy: knotting every cord in your throat, choking the windpipe with coal.

You wait together, though _wait_ 's a faint and edgeless word for the moment quavering between your ribs. He looks different by night, all his grey-and-taupe warmed to filigree shadows, a light just dense enough to trace. Lingering dusk spills gold down his nose, his cheek, the sharp-felt crook of his smile; you could slide a thumb down his jaw to smear light across his skin.

But he turns his head, catching a separate thought; his mouth tips up. "We're not going to make this a habit," he says.

A warning and a faint, starry glance—but light doesn't reshape distance, only reveals it. Your smile tips after his, a crescent as secret as the moon. "Wasn't planning on it," you say.

You get it. You've learned this lesson a thousand days over. Each heartbeat's a tick from a clock-hand which will circle through only once. Here you are together under the shell of a night hollowed into stars, which must crack into a new day.

You'll wake up soon.

# *

  
An alarm whines. Gold-white-gold flickering in scales through the blinds. _Morning_ —and your eyes snap wide.

Heartbeats into the new day and you're prying yourself out from your coiling sheets. Night clings sour to your teeth, and you're boiling over in your skin, itching and twitching. You swipe a palm down each arm, across a pebbling cheek, nails scraping bone; in the hazy dawn, you scratch and scratch and scratch until the skin pebbles and blisters to no relief.

A thin ribbon of sniggering wafts across the room.

Gone's the salt-grease of diner fries and the milkshake's draping, frothy cold; Cadet Akira's a faraway dream, his felt and sullen flame snuffed beneath the burn of new welts simmering up through your skin. Today you are Cadet Yaroslav Kudrinsky, a bow-legged balloon of angry histamines; you are seventeen, bright and bespectacled and sick for home, and your roommate powdered your sheets with parsley again.

You tuck your chin against your collarbone and soldier from cot to class; you mumble rolling, blocky excuses and squint at your boots when instructors sigh over your puffy jaw, your bruisy limbs, your twelve-minute jogging speed throughout the day. Alone you slump through the halls, lower and lower through the day; on your breaks, you prop _The Feynman Lectures in Physics_ over your swelling cheeks, grind your teeth into your strawberry-mint gum. From your new angle, the Garrison's different and the same: cadets shuffling through its halls in packs. Steel-backed officers rattling up and down the steps. Yellow spilling over windowsills and cracked doorways in the late afternoon.

A dark head flashes by you in corridor 2-C: Akira, smouldering beneath his heavy clouding, still tangled up in his fourth dichotomy: leave, or don't. Slava has Introduction to Astrobiology next; you hurry away alone.

Only one flash breaks the routine: rounding a corner from classroom towards the cafeteria, your feet drag to a stop. A brilliant note's lashed through the quiet. Too late, you know its sound: the expectant beat of someone who's told a joke, the low, belling laugh whose echo you've been carrying in your veins.

A shiver hooks in your lungs, dry and meaningless. You know better than to look.

Keep walking.

# *

  
You wake up to the body of a girl; but her name slips out of your skull in the same instant that you land on the thought. Names don't matter. Better discoveries: she's got a phone, a wireless connection, a wheezy silver desktop with its casing stripped away—the equipment of a girl well-prepared for adventurous desert spiders lured in by the whine of CPU fans. Five minutes on Google Maps tells you everything you need to know. You pinch your dad's car keys, grind its ignition and stamp the gas into a grinding chatter with your good foot, drive out just as he comes roaring onto the veranda. Skill doesn't always translate between bodies, but she's got a good spine under all that round flesh, marrows and nerves of weathered steel; you memorise the angle it takes to rest her palm along the wheel's curve, just steady enough to wind you through the backroads. Out, out, out you go, rattling past fields of rocks and bristling desert scrub, whistling your way up the same state road.

The desert's bleaching day drums beneath your skin; your veins sing with its racing heat.

You drive up to the crest of a crumbling overlook, where rock runs to grainy gold. On the bluff, you prop yourself up on the guard rail, uncap your water bottle. You wait, and wait—wait until dusk smears the sky. Through the waning, hazy daylight, a little red plane comes chugging up through the thin-stitched clouds.

This isn't about Takashi Shirogane, his weakness for bad fry toppings or fixing Red Arrows. Even in a soft, pillowy body with a dragging leg, you still want to see him fly.

# *

  
It gets easier. The Garrison's guards keep strict, geometric routines; Dave's Hardware in town sells wire trimmers from nine in the morning to ten in the drunken night. You teach yourself a hundred strategies: snipping and tugging the fence's loops apart; buying a disgraced cadet's old ID and pasting your school photo over it, pulling on gray jackets and tugging your cap down. Petty receipts and missing days heap high behind you, and it doesn't matter. You break in to stand in that mix of sand and polish and engine oil—just to drift across the daylight-boiled tarmac at dusk, with an engine's thrum seeping through to bone. Over and over, you break in just to come back to something.

You land another cadet's life, too, now and then. Those are the easiest days. The Garrison's a hard-eged place, but it doesn't expect much. A flash of skill, here and there, and they'll feed you, coach you, cage you into routines and leave you to run your own life. It's not much to pay, and not enough to coax you into planting roots: the transient ideal.

Today you're in the first tide of new pilots, planted right in the middle row. Cadet Airman Basic Parminder stands with fewer than did Cadet Akira—it's no surprise, then, that the crowd's awash with diligence, every eye anchored at the forefront of the tarmac, where Instructor Shirogane's mapping out the parts of the Red Arrow for concern and care. Military down to his bones—though a straying breeze still tugs and flirts the little tuft above his brow. 

Under your dark eye, a girl steps forward, slinging a neat salute. _The best in your class,_ memory tells you, and Parminder's secret rival— _secret_ because she hasn't announced the fact to anybody yet. Whatever else, Parminder's got taste: her rival's delicate with the flyer as she heads over; she checks its turbines and wheels, tugs the handle before she climbs up into the seat, and the instructor follows after. 

The plane jolts to a start, wheels in a ragged circle before it goes shuddering down the asphalt; when it rises, its takeoff sweeps up at a thirty-degree angle, precise enough to grind nails to palms and jam Parminder's thumb through her fraying braid. To and fro, she winds her flight through chugging, mindless lines. It's only on the third pass that you see it—the breaking twist before she tilts the plane into a dive. It sweeps along the runway, too low, a trick that sends murmurs cascading over the crowd. Her ascent's too steep—and the second time she comes down, you see the wings _quake_ as if against shattering bones, a second before the plane rolls sideways. Its long wing misses the ground by inches, and an alarm's shrilling splits the air.

No. It isn't an alarm.

The crowd's churning; a few cadets have broken from the throng already, skittering into the complex to find help. The pilot's scream bristles in your ears, and thought blanks out. She's dragging the Red Arrow through swoops and inevitable falls. Your steps pound the asphalt—you're tearing across the runway, matching the next pass, and in the instant that the flyer's low pass sweeps the ground, you _jump_.

Turbines rattle. You've got your hands locked along the rim of a window; the world's all flash and jumbling splinters. Through the snarling winds, you catch glimpses—the instructor's got his fingers on the wheel, but your rival's screaming, wrenching at controls that have locked against her pulls. "Don't! Don't touch it, I won't fail this— _I won't fail_ —" He's murmuring something, low and quick as the plane skews with your weight; neither notices you until you _haul_ yourself over the edge and come tumbling through the cockpit.

Your rival finds her voice first, a heart-thick terror. "Parmin—"

But it's too late—one beat and you're tumbling against her with all the plane's momentum, unlatching the stupid belt, your elbows jarring her ribs, hip thudding hip to knock her out of the seat. "Stay _down_ ," you bite out, and knock Shirogane's hand away as you haul at the wheel. You scrub through Parminder's memories, flashing through all the trivia of gut instinct and growing up with three sisters in engineering. 

"Where's the manual extension on this thing?"

"What?"

The flyer's trembling like an animal— _I have some bad news for you about the Red Arrow's flying capacity_ , and it was never an engine meant to take these showy ascents and tumbles, the weight of three bodies in a cockpit built for two. You don't have time. "She locked the autonav somehow," you shout above the roar. "I can't engage the landing gear—we're gonna have to do everything by hand!"

No questions, just kinetics—in an instant, he's bracing over the console, leaning into your space. Your eyes snap up—his gaze is dark and fixed, his mouth bitten red and sharp. A handle clanks loose above your left, and he yanks it into a hard clunk: the sound of the gear strut disconnecting from the uplocks and the hydraulic cylinder. The downlocks pull loose; three gears give way beneath your stretching fingers.

Together you set to work, plugging in the overrides. The steering wheel yields. Without a word, you drag the plane back into an even line. The breakneck surge eases into a lazier curve, just cresting the day's candyfloss clouds—you ease down in spirals until you can coast onto the asphalt.

The class's half-scattered, half-wrecked, clustering into a collective big-eyed stare as you clamber out from the cockpit, one after another. Your rival grips your arm as she drops behind you. " _Min,_ " she whispers, a summer-sweet breath that curls static through the pit of your stomach.

"Nice work, AB," a voice says overhead. United in terror, you lurch together against the impact of Takashi Shirogane—his wry instructor's smile, measured and waiting. "But that was dangerous—you shouldn't have jumped like that."

At the corner of your eye, a scrubby scarecrow of a boy's plucking at the jacket of another round-faced boy, an indignant weathervane. Parminder's temper flares with yours. "I _saved your lives_ ," you bite out. Your voice thuds through an accent and cracks—you didn't even know girls could _do_ that.

The instructor steps forward, crowding into your space. Heat sweeps through your cheekbones. "You got into the flyer because you took a chance on a machine with open frames," Takashi Shirogane says as you stare back, stark-eyed and defiant; his voice flexes with a patience that Akira would have despised and a kindness that makes Parminder curl into herself. "You're not always going to have the opportunity to do it that way. Most of the cargo pilots'll be working with fixed-wing machines. Their doors will lock. The pilots headed for the astronaut program get even less. That technique won't work for you again."

Your wrists jerk; Parminder's unshaking fingers knot in fists. "I can take it one day at a time."

The instructor considers his lacing fingers. "I can see I'm not going to get anywhere with you out here. ABs—we'll call today's lesson dismissed. If someone could send a few people to Iverson and Montgomery, tell them that the situation's been handled—I'd appreciate it. I'd like to see you in my office," he adds: the remark needs no redirection.

He turns on his heel; you follow as the class splits, its splinters flying in every direction but yours. Down the hall you trail together, trudging across a seismic silence.

He'll be angry—he's angry already, shoulders wired into a strict tension, his eyes fastened on every tile and fleck outside your orbit. Parminder's belly knots tight; gleaned memory bursts through you like buckshot: how _proud_ she'd been, thundering with tears and adrenaline, when she'd spread the letter over their kitchen table; her voice shrilling bird-high as she bawled her grandfather out over the admission— _there's no honor to being a pilot, girl! you think these officers, these great men, they will look at us better when you are flying for this country? at least with engineers, you get money, you don't put your name where others can make it into a target_ —and oh, how she'd sworn, how she'd promised to be good and best and better than _anybody_ , and here you've drawn her at last, into a trickshow and a tragedy—

The door rattles, closing.

"If you're going to kick me out," you say, breathy on Parminder's indignation, "just get it over with already."

The instructor crosses over to the scratch-riddled desk, the greying glass; his hands lock behind his back as he stares out to the emptied runway. "I think there's supposed to be a couple stages before that."

"Oh, right. _Preboot_ before you _de_ camp. Like that means anything—"

Too late, your eyes flash up. The instructor's already turned.

"Akira," he says.

Instinct moves where memory won't. A stride drives you back against the door; your fingers braid and cinch behind you, knuckles battering the wood. It's dumb luck for you that fear and scrambling temper carry much the same signs. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

He laughs, a fleeting cut of sound, and chafes a hand over each wrist. "Right. It's funny—I don't either. But I'd know that flying anywhere." He veers around the desk—but his step stutters, and he tilts away instead to pace the length of the room, desk to tinny shelves and back again, sifting the distance like sand. "There's a pretty big chance that I'm wrong. I know this isn't—logical. And even if it were possible, all of our pilots get trained on a strict course—Garrison pilots especially. Normally a flying _style_ just means you're not very good, or maybe you're just not as good as you think you are." His smile flashes out, resignation in a lightning-stroke. "I'm probably concerning you. Sorry. You just—"

"Just," you echo, in your hollow girlish voice, _just_ curving into _jost_. You've no reason to answer him. You don't.

"You fly," he says, "like a friend of mine."

Memory whirls alive with his gaze: the same glance that he'd cast your way over the diner's round table, lanced over the gears when he'd risen from the passenger seat, warm on a dune outside the Garrison. A private, summerbred look like an artless secret to keep between you, the kind of warmth that'd reel anybody in.

"I didn't say we were friends," you say.

His arms tumble back to his sides—though his fists flex, though his fingers knot with the questions that never quite wind their way up through his teeth. "That," the instructor breathes, "doesn't make sense."

"Bad dreams usually don't." You fold your narrow arms; regret stitches your lips with a bite. "Forget it. My—this—" You're losing the thread, twitching into a glower as your elbows jab out. "Look. Her name's Parminder Kaur, all right? Just be nice to her when she sees you tomorrow. In a couple days, she'll forget anything even happened, and you won't have anything to worry about anymore."

But he's looking at you still, caught as if on the tide of a thought. "What about you?"

"I'm not your problem," you say, fists grinding. "I'm not _anyone's_ problem."

The door burns against your back with its arches and indents and every forlorn scratch; its shape's locking an ache into your bones, framing the skeleton of an escape. Your tendons flicker with its promise: _run. Go, before—_

But he's smiling: a lean lighter-spark of a smile. The thought evaporates. "Well—you're here right now," he says, soft against all your steeled edges. "And I'm talking to you. Though I have to say, it feels weird to be talking to a friend without a name." 

Your shoulders grit against the wood.

His mouth skews. There's something fearsome about that look: all his molten attention bent to you on an instant's notice. _Get out of here_ , but in the flicker it takes to register the thought, he's already reached back over his black-scraped desk to snap his keys into a palm. His eyes settle on you, bright with the lodestar of a familiar thought.

"Let's go somewhere," he says.

# *

  
You drive out, a relentless arrowing line which splits and branches and breaks only at his direction. Whether it's predestination or a lack of imagination, your doom finds you after all: when you pull over, it's into the exact same parking space by the diner. ("You're kidding," you say as you back into parallel, and Parminder's lilt skewers the question: _you are kidding_. "Do you ever eat anything else?") Inside, he slides into another glossed booth, opens his handheld. You order fries while he taps out five emails: four to kill his afternoon schedule, one in brief apology to some tangled mess of titles for snagging a Garrison vehicle without permission. Your milkshake slides to your hand in a frosted glass; you sip while he knots his fingers into a stretch.

He's delaying; but then, so are you.

"That was an incredible save," he says while you crush the straw's papery sheath into a thumbnail.

You say, "I wasn't thinking about saving anyone."

A heartbeat flares in the empty air, spinning on mute. He's still looking at you, hard brows eased into patience, burning with the kind of unwavering light that seems to come to him like breathing. "It's not always about the intent. Sometimes we don't mean to be great—but our actions impact other people. That's enough."

"Easy for you to say."

That earns a laugh, though you don't see why. The first fry plate drops onto your table; he snags his own piece, motions with it like a conductor. "So tell me about you."

You don't want to; you do. You tell him the story end-to-end: the break-ins, wire trimmers and stolen cars; family arguments that you've waged as a bloodless impostor; the bad answers and quieter days. Everything.

You can be anyone, though your bodies tend to be of the same age. Muscle memory teaches you all you need; you wake up steeped in new languages, heartfelt loves and grudges as familiar as childhood scars. You've never lived the same life twice. Your geographic scope's curbed somehow; you never jump more than fifteen miles from your last point. The transition happens when you fall asleep—nothing else slows it. When you were in a body-just-turning ten, they'd celebrated your birthday; Cassy hadn't been the best life you'd visited, bird-boned and coughing, but her family had loved you for it anyway, the kind of mindless love that wraps around you regardless of shape. Cassy's older mother took you shopping in your dusty little town and whispered stories to you about each toy, coaxed you to spin them out with her. The toys were stolen antique shipments; the toys were transformed soldiers in rebellion against the Galaxy. Cassy's younger mother took advantage of your birthday to resurrect her old feud with the best pastry chef in town; she kept you on the line and made you play the part of _the good one_ , insisting that you didn't care what your birthday cake looked like as long as the money went to a charity, to doing something _useful_. She pretended to snuff a candle when your lungs swelled up to try, and tumbled over like a lioness when you tackled her. Three days in a row you lay down and stared up dry-eyed into the dark, clinging to Cassy's wiry arms, her tattered lungs and her grave, brilliant love, waiting for the dreamless break of dawn.

You lost them anyway.

He taps out notes as he eats, in quick, economical swipes. The screen's tilted to your eye: a bulletpoint transcript of your answers, indented with off-handed theories and deductions. Cassy probably lives south of the railroad tracks where the neighborhoods were rebuilt after the Garrison complex swept through. Parminder may be related to Swati Kaur, who works as lead in the jetpro lab, and Vera Kaur, astrobio's communications manager.

Your timeline snaps out before his typing does. You tuck an ankle beneath your thigh, push yourself back along the booth's plumping curve, drain an inch from your milkshake. The cream of it aches when you swallow, thick and too sweet, the kind of luxury that you don't need. Better, memory tells you, would have been to mix milk with new-boiled cinnamon and ginger and black looseleaf—but you stop the aching torrent there, leave that for Parminder to sift. Every body carries its own longings in tendon and nerve and marrows; the trick's not to let them swallow you first.

He's frowning, fingers left to idle on the keys. The screen's glow refracts white over his drawn brows. "Do they remember you after you're gone?"

"I don't know. I've never met anyone who has." It's harder to tell from the outside; you've never been good at reading the faces that you aren't wearing. You've been looking for answers for as long as you've understood the word, but those answers have never encompassed other people. "Sometimes I spend one day in someone's body and wake up as their sister, or their cousin, or their best friend. They never talk about forgetting days. Some of them kept diaries, so I'd fill stuff in. I saw one of them read what I wrote, once. They remember everything I do like they chose to do it. And sometimes it's like they do." You stop, but there's no real explanation for the impulses of the body, muscle memory and reflexes. You live them or you don't. "It's like it just happens to them."

"How long have you been like this?"

You stare into your frosting glass, the bubbles filmed over in milky clusters. "I don't know. I think—I had a mom once. I don't remember if she said anything to me, but we were in a weird place, with these purple walls. I remember these—white lights, and this weird glass, and some kind of gunfire."

"That," the instructor says, with care, "doesn't sound like anything that's happened around here."

That's underselling it. "Could've been aliens," you suggest, just to see him snort. With dark-stemmed fingers, you stroke your straw through the shake's leftover froth. "Once—her name was Phil. She was thirteen and her parents left her home alone for the weekend. You've probably even seen her around town in a football jersey—she really likes going out. I didn't know what was happening back then, but I could _feel_ something wrong. So I took their spare car and I drove out to the desert. I don't know where I went, or how long I really walked—but there's a cave out there somewhere. Close by. If you go deep enough into the system, someone drew—these really old markings of some kind of blue lion. They weren't just graffiti—they were _etched_ there, right into the rock. And I just had this feeling that it was _connected_ to me somehow."

"Ancient markings," he echoes, and sifts back through the tangle that's littered his screen, as if some stray word could snap all the pieces together. "You think you were always supposed to end up like this? Jumping from body to body?"

Your throat prickles. Your knuckles perch against the glass's flared rim. "I don't know," you say, and that's half-true, too. The alternative hooks in your teeth like a curse: that you could've been an accident. That you will always be this way. That the universe is cold coincidence, and you found Takashi Shirogane because nothing cared enough to stop you. "And I don't think _supposed to_ really matters. I'm here now. This is all I can do."

His gaze swings back from the screen. "I can see that," he says, but it's too careful: an instructor's voice, measuring patience as if for sale. "But this doesn't look like something you want to sustain in the long run. The people you're borrowing might remember your choices like their own—but that's not true."

"What're you saying?"

"You broke into the Garrison," he says, soft and slow. "You haven't been caught yet, but sooner or later, you're going to get these kids into trouble."

"I _had_ to."

You're staring, dark-eyed and jagged with intent—but you need him to understand this: the gap which strands you from each name and framing body, day by day; the iron weight of all these little routines clapped over your arms and ankles, nothing you'd ever chosen or could ever choose; the conviction of _flying_ , tangled up in something that runs deeper in you than mere veins or marrow. There's no place for you in this world except what you dig out with your own desperate, stolen time.

"I'm not saying that I wouldn't have done the same thing. But this isn't fair, either. You can't keep pulling lives out of their routines while you—"

"So," you say, louder until your rattling bewilderment overruns him, "what? Am I just supposed to pretend that I don't exist? Keep hopping from body to body until I find one that'll _die_ on time?"

Your voice's rising, risen—you choke the words away on the brink of a shout. Your head jerks down; your fingers brace and bristle against the white table. Silence cuts between you.

"Let's compromise," he says, at last. Sound tufts up at a side: he's snagging a napkin. His tidy hand inks two lines across the white before he slides it to you: an email, a number. "Write me or text me. Anywhere you are, as long as it's in driving distance—I'll come and see you. Just live out the lives of—whoever you're in for that day. Don't make waves. For a few hours, every couple days, you can be yourself. Until we figure out something better for you, we'll do anything you want."

Your fist tightens, crumpling the napkin. You could smear the ink, tear the tissue and trash it. There's a thousand ways to lose this moment still. "You're a Garrison instructor," you say, too slow. "How're you going to get the time?"

His smile tilts. "Luckily, you caught me at loose ends." He cocks a brow beneath your stare. "Something on my face?"

Sidelong smiles and steady inflections, bare and bright as pearl. Face it: you were gone with the first shock of his laughter, the gaudy spill of yolk over fries, the moment he'd said _take her off the ground_ and grinned like a promise. It doesn't matter. You've already lost.

"Call me Keith," you say.

He rumples back the tuft that's swung between his eyes. One strand prickles up between his fingers, rakish and defiant. "Is that your name?"

"Just _say it._ "

The sound's a shock in your lungs, too fierce, electric even as you swallow—but he only blinks. "Keith," he says, and it sounds easy as nothing should. "Then you really have to call me Shiro."

A breath crests in your throat. _Shiro_ , like an answer, though you hadn't asked, though you hadn't thought. In all the world, there will never be another sound like this: your name in his mouth like a struck chord singing of home.

# *

  
He promises, and answers to it. Day by day, you write to him; time and again, he comes to meet you. You go out together: to the dusty town library, scraped over by decades of sandstorms; to a theatre wedged between two sandwich shops, whose auditoriums stretch out to vast, deep hollows with velvet seats; to every burger joint and 24-hour takeout place in town. They're tame little trips, dared here and there for hours at a stretch—nothing that'll shock your hosts later, remembering. Just stolen pockets of time where a bright-eyed pilot tumbles into your orbit, turns to you, calls you by your own name.

But real life trickles back in drops: a trip cuts short half an hour early with the droning of his cell. Diagrams wrapped in ink-riddling notes that he brings out to the stars with you. Misnaming the Pleiades as Ursa Minor— _twice_. Of course these things tide back. The Garrison's a young project: it demands the best of its chosen, crams every inch of their schedules. He looks for you, but that's no real claim.

Still you make time. Alone, you're a lone petty offender; but together, you're a conspiracy. In a flash of ruthless power, Shiro rearranges the guard patrols to skirt the area where you've clipped the steel fence. He snags a deck of blank student cards for your use and disposal. Sometimes you go out in the Red Arrow again; with blocky flip-phones and smartphones, you snap shots of him when he chances to break any regulation: here a moment's one-handed driving, there a dial twitching seven miles above the speed limit. Every time, he stops, puts up a hand; his mouth pinches for a dignity that'll never come, he grumbles, _Keith, focus!_ when he catches you filming his hand resting on the aileron controls. 

You come to him as you are: with tattooed shoulders, in a scuttling, underfed frame, wearing buck teeth or a roll of pudge clinging above your hips or a gymnast's acrobatics. He calls you by the same name every time. Through a copper-lined dusk, you text him to meet at the town's highway exit—turn up wrapped in silk and leather boots and a Miata exactly one decade old, flushed reckless with pride at having wriggled free from your adoring family's hectic hive. You race like boys, kicking up storms down the dusty highway. The Jeep drops behind first, trails the Miata to a weedy rest stop with all the lights long snuffed. Planted across five withered parking spots at once, he props an elbow against the windshield, slings you a water bottle as you drape yourself over the car's hood. 

One heel anchors on the curve while the other kicks in a loose and easy pendulum. The bottlecap cracks the silence. "What?" you say. He's staring again.

With some care, Shiro claps the Jeep's door shut, crosses the worn, glossy asphalt. "You make an interesting girl," he says.

"Uh. _Parminder_ was a girl."

"So was Teresa. I remember—but that's not what I meant. I just," he smoothes a hand over his mouth, "didn't expect you to show up in so many ribbons. You really pull it off."

You glance down. Today you're a waif of a thing, stark veins winding down the delicate articulation of your wrists and elbows, all talcum-powdered curls and an incongruous beak of a nose. Your escape was a mess—siblings and parents and aunts and nieces cropped up behind every corner and counter. In the end, you'd torn out in the first thing that covered you, snagged your mother's jackboots on a bunny-hopping escape through the garage, made the call to Shiro from a gas station two miles out. A close-boiled ride's only crumpled the outfit—left your skirt flouncing in folds over your thighs. Its silk droops everywhere, sleek and sulking; its sleeves flare like a conqueror's banners; its collar swoops beneath your clavicle, and three unlaced ribbons trail out of some intricate knot to the tops of your thighs. Silk, you've discovered, mostly means that one sleeve will slip off to bare skin with every shrug. "She woke up like this," you say, distasteful.

"Hold on," Shiro says. "That's a _nightgown_? Keith!"

"What?" You tug the strap back. Everything's covered, collarbones to thighs, nothing worse than what she'd wear on any other day. You've learned a little discretion—even Tabby and the diner's slouchy 11 PM regulars no longer curl their lips and look away from Shiro's endless string of ever-changing dates. But nothing's ever quite enough for _Takashi Shirogane_. Feet away, he claps a hand to his nape, stares in reproach, waits in the dusk stiff as a new signpost. In answer, you kick your boot onto the hood, hiking up the skirt's flirty hem.

He caves first. A zip splits the silence as he yanks his jacket zipper down; his collar bounces in the flurry of unraveling sleeves. "She probably doesn't want the whole town remembering that she drove around with some _strange guy_ twice her age in her sleepwear. Give her a break."

Your eyes flash to his mouth; caught on her impulse, you swallow, thick, against the memory of leather backseats and the taste of sweat. "I don't think she cares," you say—but you wear his jacket for the rest of the night anyway, just to stave off his sternness. Just for the way your heartbeat goes slow and swaying beneath its weight, with the clench of starch gone sharp at the backs of your teeth.

Not every day's a race. Staying on Garrison grounds becomes its own routine. On the easier nights, he'll leave some old greyed movie on his little office projector for background noise, review the security tape of the lone camera trained on the broken fence for unauthorised intrusions; on others, you snag skeins of steaming ramen from a shared porcelain bowl, googling local sites of interest while he studies. Hour by hour, you learn him. Shiro has a clock-tick of a scar which gleams just beneath his jaw, the compass point of some ridiculous childhood accident; he rakes at the crowning tuft of his hair when he's exhausted, but lifts his head high when he's lecturing and means it. From time to time, some voiceless signal will prickle at his nape; he'll look up and smile like it's a relief to find you there, still there.

"You've been working for a while."

It's a double-question, layered with curiosity like all the worst people do it—but he won't mind if you don't tell him. That makes it easier. "Still looking at the cave systems," you say. "They've got two that are kind of off-road—the state shut them down, so no one ever visits them."

"You still think the lion has something to do with what's happening to you."

Your throat flexes; answers spark and stop in your teeth. "I don't remember much," you say instead, and your eyes cling to your fingers on the keys. "But I get a _feeling_ sometimes—like there's something still out there. Something I've already seen."

"Something," Shiro echoes. He's propped an elbow against the desk, leaning on his knuckles, eyes all featherlight focus. "As in sewer alligators? Or _something_ , as in something that could help you?"

The paragon of dignity: you ignore the bait. "I don't know what it is—just that it's important somehow. It wants me to come back to it—but it's not that clear about how, or even where it is. It's like—whatever I'm looking for, it's waking up out there."

"Or maybe _you_ are."

Too soon—the words wheel from body to body, all impact. Shiro's the worst for this, explorer before he's ever a scientist—he takes a theory and spins it out to countries unknown, tracing a longing path to some heart out of sight. You don't want to think about it with today's body, slouching around in a series of mustard-splotched t-shirts, with rat-scrawny fingers and the half-hearted prickle of an embarrassing beard.

"Maybe I never had a body," you mutter, like a jinx. "It was just a cave."

"I don't buy that. You're the most self-possessed person I know, Keith."

Your eyes flash over your little screen—he's grinning, the lightstruck half-smile that means he's not abashed at all. "That _sounds_ like a bad joke."

"I'm serious," Shiro says, with the clear dead-eye of a man who's forgotten the definition of the word. "Sometimes I wake up in the mornings and I barely remember _what_ I am—"

You stop; your shoulders settle in a deliberate line. The laptop fans whir to life as you push it aside, as you rise, as you stalk over to seize the arms of his rolling chair and wheel him out from behind the desk. Shiro yelps, digging his heels in, but that's the scrabbling of a tragic novice in deskchair wars. By the time he's scrambled back to his bearings, you've already brought him down. The chair jolts and goes wheeling out of the way, and then you're tumbling over each other in a tumult, all elbows and crashes missed by centimeters. 

He gives way first, lets you roll on top in a flurry of kicks. For today, you'll take it. You brace over him, pulse pounding with your thighs bracketing his ribs and every breath between you rimed with faintest salt. "I can't think like that," you say, and it's true. There's a living breach between the body you wear and the person you are—and that's for you as much as it is for each body you borrow. Muscle and bone carry their own memories, the crowning points of the soul. If ever you took them for your own, they'd overtake you—your host would crowd you out. You're living a half-life because you can't demand better—because if you stop holding back, stop clinging to to the core of yourself—

"Keith."

He's settled back against the carpet; your shadow sweeps over his darkening, starless eyes. Through the stillness, there's only one heartbeat shivering between you, pulses settled, matched and bright. "I'm trying to tell you that you matter to me," Shiro says, the kind of gutting honesty that no number of days could armor you against. "If you think you don't belong here, that you don't have a place on this planet—well, you're wrong. I just have to hope that you'll figure out how to find your way out soon."

Later, you'll wind your way back to this: the uneven fluorescent lights, words heavier than any promise, weighing on your throats like a chain. His fingers drawing down your nape, splaying over your shoulder. The little hitch of his laugh teetering on the brink, sweeter than the Miata rocketing down an empty highway at dusk or the Red Arrow's racing winds. 

Here you are, the core of you, caught between his hands. Safe for the night. Safe at last.

# *

  
Your name is Matthew Holt.

You wake to blurry plaster and a single printout framed in tape on a faraway wall. Some delighted hand circled a half-lidded moon, scrawled _4,700,000,000!_ above its pocked, secretive crescent. A woolly blanket's been tucked up under your chin and, you discover, a sticky note's clinging fast between your eyes. You squint across the three long inches it takes to read the equation and its denotation: _I'd check those figures. Also, if you keep running all your calc at midnight, your ship's going to explode at mile 20._

Katie's really grown into such a savage kindness.

Drowsy and plodding, you totter down the housestairs—yawn some murmuring, delighted babble about _Kerberos_ across the breakfast table to your father. Together you talk about the permits for recent jet propulsion installations until your little sister flicks wet cereal between your eyes. As dawn seeps through the drawn bay windows, you snag a flashlight off the countertop and sail out to the garage. In the passenger seat, you leaf through a first-edition _Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ by battery light while your dad sings his tuneless way through another country's greatest hits drawn from a century back.

The lab's still empty when you flag your badge at check-in, toe your way through its glassy sliding doors. This, memory tells you, is Matt's favorite part of the day: the filtered quiet when it's only you and circulated air and an intricate web of wires and calibrated devices, when the screens burn alight with a hundred new reports, just the footsoldiers of science and their king. Here, most of all, it's easy to sink into someone else's routine: re-examining the new data for the cohesion in the latest search-and-rescue satellite system, annotating new entries for your microbial cultures with light whirling through your veins, not-your-veins. You keep your head bowed as coworkers begin to trickle in—Matt's never made a habit of talking to many people. He's his own torchbearer, carrying a private light all his own; he doesn't need to look for it elsewhere.

 _Happy_. That's the word, strange and rusted in the dustiest hollow of your memory. He's happy.

"Hey. Matt, right?"

Sometime in the interim, running from checking samples to adjusting your calculations, daylight's slung its pearling spears across the floor. Mere feet away, an instructor stands with the pneumatic doors just whispering shut, his jacket swaying open and his hair all tufts. He's got some complicated mechanical part tucked under one arm; his grin quirks a little as you lift your head. "Commander Choi sent me over," Shiro says in his artless, easy way. "Apparently you're running short on delivery boys."

 _Complicated mechanical part_ —but that's your thought blurring the lens of Matt's memory. Matthew Holt would know what Shiro's carrying, must've been looking forward to its delivery for post-it-littered days—you could name it if only you'd let your eye slide away long enough to measure its composite pieces. But it's _Shiro_ , caught out in an unexpected hour with the dust of a morning flightcheck still tumbling off his sleeves. You're unraveling: Matt's light instincts tangling your memory into a sunburst smile. 

"Hey, Takashi—oh, wait. Shirogane!" Matt says, and you're fiddling with his glasses on the same thought. The Garrison's mix of informality and titles blurs the reel of names on his-your tongue, and _Takashi_ and _Shirogane_ sound the same to a desert-bred ear as far as surnames go. It's hard to remember with which one's the family name and which one's the given. Instinct's unsteady engine drives you forward, props your thin arms along the counter, rests your chin on your wrists just to smile back to him from a new angle. "You don't come out to the lab much, do you?"

He ducks a little with his shrug, shifts the thing to another arm. "Pilots and scientists don't exactly share a regimen," Shiro says, wry. "Don't worry—you'll have plenty of time to get sick of me when we fly out."

"That's hard to imagine."

That earns a flash, his mouth skewing into a real smile. "The fulfillment of a lifelong dream? Yeah. I know the feeling."

"Getting sick of you," you say.

A heartbeat lapses into silence.

Shiro cocks his head, gaze running mild. "That's a new line. Nice delivery."

"Think so?"

You've propped yourself up against the counter, eyes unfaltering. His smile crooks as his brows quirk up; he shifts the weight under one arm, the restlessness of rue more than suspicion. "Where's all this coming from?" 

From seeing him days out from your last reckless tour; from Matt's infectious starry conviction, the easy certainty that the universe will always open door after door for a Garrison commander's son, the wave of gentle coincidences that's washed into his history. It's from how Shiro hasn't guessed, still—the way he holds himself to an easy distance, ready to set his part aside and turn back. Time and again, he's seen you coming in jogging sweatpants and embarrassing t-shirts, thick-framed and slender alike. There's something novel, a delight to Matt's mild and experimental heart, about not getting caught.

You wend your way around the counter, stopping just steps away with a hand on your hip, your chin tilted high. "Take a guess," you say.

The moment beats between you. 

His gaze doesn't flicker—drifts over the tilt of your chin held high and your gaze steady on his. "Keith," he says.

Silence hangs, but a different kind: his pupils gone stark, his weight shifting towards you through the lightning-lash of a heartbeat.

Your throat locks; your vision blurs. Possibility's teetering under you like a precipice. Matt Holt is the wrong height for it, his speckled lenses filmy with thoughts always drifting a thousand miles from Earth. Through the long morning, he's thought of distant stars a thousand times, and never once about the _flight_. Matt'd rather arrive than travel. He likes people but understands them as anomalies, a compendium of miracles built up from the cellular level; he observes them like a boy bent to the far end of a telescope, studying bodies propelled by forces unseen, wonders measurable only as they swing through his orbit. Caught by his warm slow rhythm, you'd let yourself slip into his daily habits and routines, his muted laboratory practices—and still Shiro'd known you.

You could kiss him, just so. Matthew Holt has never kissed anyone, though he had a self-conscious crush on a plump freckly ex-archaeologist for one semester before he abandoned the whole pursuit. He likes stories about Paul Dirac, likes talking over deadlines for the project codenamed _Kore_ , likes his father's taste in takeout menus and going at exactly the speed limit. He's thinking about getting his driver's license in three years, after he's finished his grounding projects at the Garrison. He trusts in science before adrenaline, lets bad memories roll off like raindrops. Nothing's ever hurt him because he's never let hurt through. 

You could kiss Takashi Shirogane: press your fingers against the nape of his neck, and let the impact-memory of your choice evaporate from Matt's unresisting mouth. Let it be only the two of you in a crowding world, just this once.

Pressure blooms over your collarbone, a flame turned against your heart. Shiro's eyes hold dark. "Stop."

 _Stop_ —but it's the shape of his mouth that you register first, its unyielding gravity, the hand braced like a shield against Matt's chest. You swallow against a thick prickling heat. "What?"

"You can't—" but the burst snags in his teeth. He inhales, holds the air tight, unspools it again in an even, feathery pull. "I've told you before. You can't use the people around you as toys. I understand that it's hard when you can't hold onto anything, when you can't _feel_ too much, when you're always moving from body to body—but this isn't a solution, Keith. The people you leave behind do feel it. They have to live with what you do."

The air's shining, hazing over—there's a distance spinning open between you like a rappeling rope snapped from its hinge. You've caught his wrist, laced your thin fingers around the bone as if to root him there; your mouth shapes an ugly hook. "This isn't about _using_ people," you say, "I'm not trying to—"

But he's bowed his head. His thumb slides over Matt's knuckles, calluse-polished and familiar; you feel the weight as if through film. "I can't," Shiro says, too soft.

You haul out of his reach. You're staring, and it's Matt's shaking shock that hauls you along in a cold current, lights gone dizzy, bewildered on adrenaline. There's an impact, a twist, and then you're barreling through the gauzy, shimmering doors into the muted morning halls. You're on government property, in a secure wing littered with cameras. Some digital reel must blaze with the moment that Matthew Holt punched Pilot-Instructor Takashi Shirogane in the chest—shook out his fist as he stripped off his glasses and spun away. 

But that's a thought for later. Right now, you know, there's still one thing you're good at—one skill you can trust, always.

Alone, you keep running.

# *

  
You wake up.

Waking, gasping, waking while the world's flaring blind in every direction, white-shimmering-white-white- _white_. Glass drowns you, _light_ drowns you—you're writhing against wires rooted in your arteries, stumbling forward in hurtling-falling steps only to jolt against a pale shimmering barrier. A thin reflection gapes back at you through the hollow, simmering air. Black hair drifting like fronds, knife-edge eyes, a mouth torn red and raw into a _shout_ —

You're crying out, choking through the tank's flood, and every lungful strains new bubbles through the liquid. Salt wracks your teeth, thin as lakewater, and you're breathing _through_ the waves, bracing fists against mirrored fists again and again, hammering at the walls of some artificial, drowning alcove. You're awake and the walls are crystal, diamond, your knuckles and knees thumping hollow against some frosted glass which trembles but never cracks, watching sparks wrack the liquid like stars with every blow—

You jerk back into shivers.

The liquid stirs, wave into wave. Metal chimes and thuds along your forearms, the bumps of your spine: a hundred little devices clustered in a hive, teething with sharp little lights, each buzzing where they've beaded along the wires plugged into your flesh. Black pulsing lines which vine over your skin from elbows to wrists—it's their vibration that you're carrying, their electric hum singing through your skin like your own heartbeat, locking you into some faraway, deeper pulse. You're shaking, shaking as you slam your palms into the glass, and each impact's sounding through your skin as if through hollowed wood: painless, nerveless thud after thud.

 _This isn't real_. But the world's a surge, brightness gone livid, the walls pressing close and opaque as a coffin. Nothing but light, no cracks or openings under your hands, smooth and still, the air thinning in your lungs with the seeping pull of the wires, your veins alive on dizzy drumbeats. You're lashing out in a relentless outpour, jaw rusting heavy with the ache as your lungs strain, _let me out_ —but the liquid's trembling in your throat fit to boil, and through the bubbles there's nothing, nothing but unyielding pale walls and your skeletal empty fingers scraping and clawing at bare glass. No learned instincts, no new memories—there's no one in this stark-eyed body but you.

 _Shiro_ —

# *

  
One message for each day lost—

_Keith. You haven't sent an address along for a few days. I thought I'd check in. Everything all right?_

_I can think of a few corners in the state that still don't have Internet access. I can wait._

_Just tell me when you get back._

_Keith?_

—but that's later. You'll find them later, when it's all over.

# *

  
You wake up to another body.

Blue veins, rail-boned limbs, a room crushed with an avalanche of frills and lace. Names and memories and caging routines—the details don't matter, as they never have. Only the door matters, its steely lock snapped from the outside. The lock, the bare shelves, and the days that have stretched since your last jump.

It's just your luck that lace makes good rope.

The window shatters in a flurry; your knots hold sturdy, rolling against brick as you rappel down into the bushes. You're halfway out of your mowed green neighborhood by the time it occurs to you to swipe through your new pockets. You wind up scrabbling for change in vending machine vents and phone booth slots; you demand a cup from a wilting coffeeshop on the streetcorner and hunch down on the sidewalk to wait. It takes three hours to beg your way to the scraps of change that it'll take to bus you out to the Garrison; but time's a construct, a comfort, only one out of two necessary variables for velocity. It's already been days.

The broken fencing, the careless guard: business as usual. You fling your sparrow-slim frame forward as if into a race, chasing your shadow through the halls, and not one glance askance stops you. At six in the evening, his office door's still lit. Some unhelpful hand's crossed out half his name so that the slotted plate reads only ~~T.~~ SHIRO ~~GANE~~. A little paper crescent dangles and from the knob, jumps and sways on its string as you batter through.

" _Shiro_ ," you say, and it tears out of you, raking through your lungs into open flames, shaking as if you haven't been saying it for days on end, rasping into the empty waves of some abandoned pod, breathing it like air. 

He'd bolted up in the instant that his door thundered open—but a word, and he's drawing himself back, brows easing as surprise settles into certainty. You're draped in lace today, all bony flamingo limbs and snarled sandy hair, late by days, and still his head bows, his smile tips up—he knows you where you stand. "You know," Shiro says, all dry, low relief, "you're going to get rumors started on me. They've been talking about getting a visitors' log going, just so that they can track the foot traffic—"

Thunder. He stops. Your hands are shaking, still, where they'd slammed over his desk. "I think I found my body," you say, and all motion snaps out of him at once, leaves him staked on a knife-edged, guttering stare.

"What do you mean, _yours_?"

"I mean the one that's just _me_." There aren't words for it, the way veins and tendons had wrapped around you. The fit of each limb to your intent, never longer than you meant to reach. Gone the sensation of being crowded out, the visceral double-image of convictions yours-not-yours grinding into your bones. You lift your head. "I need your help, Shiro."

"Help," he echoes, and at once he's steering around the desk to you. "How?"

 _How?_ You haven't thought this through. Finding him'd been a waking instinct, like a magnet's needle tugging north. Your fingers flex; you straighten under his steadying gaze. "Somehow, I'm getting more focused," you say. "I can feel things—memories and feelings that don't belong to other people. For the last two days, I know I was in some kind of pod. It looked like it was in some kind of underground bunker—and it couldn't have been that far from here. And it wasn't someone else's body. It felt—right. It was _me_."

You're barreling through the words, a mindless animal running on a reel, still dizzy with images and the felt impact of crystal through your fists—but Shiro's hands close around your wrists. His thumbs sweep the ghosting hairs, the sharp-edged line of bone. "Take it easy on me, Keith," he says. "We have time. Tell me the story."

 _The story._ "Those etchings of the lion in the desert," you say, sudden and sure. "That shack in the desert I found—somehow, I know they're connected." Your eyes flare up, snagging on his. "You were right. I can't keep living other people's lives. Using them to do the stuff that I have to do. I need to figure out a way to get _back_ there."

Here, at last, you have your answer. The universe is random, a string of cold coincidences and favoritism—not a chessboard but a minefield. But you belong to it: you have a place between the black swan events and inevitabilities, and that's not nothing. He gave you that—showed you flying and conviction, brought you books worth reading and awful monochrome monotone movies, taught you how to use six different sauces on a single plate of fries without poisoning yourself. He cut to the heart of things, gave you something to hold onto. Takashi Shirogane didn't remake you into anything better—but he sees you, and so you exist. You calculate your world's axis according to his turn—simple as that.

"Without you," you say, softer, and you're stepping closer after all, pressing a palm to his shoulder. In the lab, you'd crossed lines but never touched him—you haven't touched him for weeks; and through the arch of his collarbone comes his unchanged pulse, beating to the same rhythmic, constant miracle: that he's here. That he's with you. "I'd never have figured it out—I probably wouldn't even have looked. I know you don't have a lot of time, but Shiro—if you could come with me—"

"Keith," he says, wild, "I _can't_."

You stop.

His head jerks down as if to look away—but he straightens in the end to face you. "I was going to tell you. I've been trying," he laughs, a low rattle, "for two weeks—just to find the right time to say it. I'm going to be gone for the next year."

Thoughts pitch one after another headlong, doubt blown out into a new universe, starry with fears. He could be running from you, too: ready to spin himself into another person and another story the way you do every day.

But no doubt could last between you.

"Kerberos," you say. Matt Holt's memory flickers up through your veins: _the fourth moon of Pluto to be discovered, existence announced on 20 July 2011._ One of the farthest natural satellites which still falls within the orbit of the solar system, all of its disparate parts locking into the Kore Project's deadlines. It fits.

"We've been preparing for this mission for almost two years. Trying to get the funding to line up. I've been training for the last—"

"You don't have to explain it to me," you say, bitter-mouthed on all of Matt's dusty remembered eagerness. His dreams wheel through the back of your skull in pastels: the easy lights of a boy who's never wanted what he couldn't have. "You have to go."

A palm clasps your wrist; this time, you don't pull away. "You said you can't find your body without me," Shiro says. "Whatever's happening to you—am I part of it?"

You haven't looked at him in a long time—not in full, not really. Now you do, as if to take the image and press it between pages: follow the trail of his gunpowder-black brows, the red brass panels of his uniform. The sharp line of his body turned to you, an anchor that you can't quite frame in words. "No," you say, and a laugh rusts in your lungs. "That's not—what I meant when I said that. I just—for a long time, it hasn't mattered. I don't even remember what it was like anymore. Living my own life. Every day, I could jump from person to person because I knew there was nothing to go back to. 

And then I found you."

It's nonsense, what you're saying, noise more than reason, a current of meaningless fearful longing. And still—"When I'm with you—it's like the world goes clear. Everything falls into place, and I know what I have to do. So if I'm going to find my real body, be myself again, then I—"

The words stop, eddying away—but you don't need more than that. If he doesn't understand this, then he's never understood you at all; you know better.

His grip tightens; in the quiet, Shiro bows his head, tips it against yours, warm as a sunburst's dazzling. "A few months ago, I was trying to figure out how to up my weight count and lower my time in the T-45," he says, wry. "Listen to me, Keith. I'm not in a position to make promises right now—so you'll have to be my only one. In ten months, I'll be back. If you haven't figured yourself out by then, I'll leave the Garrison. I'll be with you for as long as it takes to find yourself."

" _No._ "

The world reels. There's a promise, and then there's this.

"No one's been as far as Kerberos," you say, and every word strikes off your teeth like sparks from flint. "Making it the round trip in ten months wouldn't just be a world record—you'd be defining spaceflight as _anyone_ knows it. The second you get back, everyone's going to want you to work on something new. Kerberos's just the start, it's the chance of a lifetime—"

"No," he says. "You are."

He has a knack for that, saying the kind of thing that wrecks and reduces you. You've stood against tempests, but not him. A heartbeat, an instant, and you're tugging his hand out from between you, your head turning up, up, lips parting just for—

Your mouths stop, suspended.

Tension's scarring down his spine, but he hasn't moved. This close, every movement flickers and sings: the slow pull of his lungs, the way the breath flutters in his teeth. "I told you—"

"I know," you whisper, eyes caught, mouth dry. "I know. I'm not asking you for anything. Just—when you get back, when I find who I am—you're really going to owe me."

He trails fingers down your hair. In a reckless flare, you drag your palm down the line of his jaw, smooth your thumb over his lip. His breath snags, electric. He leans into you, breaths tangling; your hand tumbles, and in the dark of his eyes there's only you. 

"We'll take as long as you want," Shiro says, soft and stirring.

# *

  
You wake, you rise, you drive. On clumsy-new limbs, you crest the hill, brace yourself against a spindling grey tree, watch as the skeletal launch complex flurries to life. Figures hurrying in every direction, cameras snapping like lightning. On the horizon, standing at the very brink of sound and sight, you shout down to a figure trudging along in the thick suiting of astronaut gear, already armored against space. Just a name; just his name.

The figure lifts its head briefly, but turns into the gate without another glance. You're still, still looking at the closed door as the first rocket booster charges, roaring white into the rising dust.

# *

  
Your name is Jamie Taylor Fritzen.

Your name is Tom Cloyd.

Your name is Richard Cole.

You wake and dream and wake again; you build a diagram in the account you've shared with his Garrison address. Photographs of scrubby stretches of desert, screenshots of conspiracy forum topics where they raised nearby cities and counties. You don't write letters to him; you know better than that. Light crosses space too slow for what's between you. _I need your help_ , you'd said, but this is a worthwhile choice, too: solve the riddle on your own time. Learn your own limbs over again. Hurtle out to the landing with no ghosts in your shadow, until there's nothing between you but the memories of all the stars he's crossed.

On some morning, you wake as Christopher J. Hughes, who hates mornings with the kind of black loathing that tars your bones. Drowsy, tendons dissolved to sand and grumbling, you fumble out from under a creamy duvet to quell the radio's blaring:

_—ace Launch System contingency has been declared in Mission Control, KXTA, as a result of the loss of communication with the SLS Exploration Mission 52 at approximately 4 P.M. PST Saturday, August 14, after Commander Samuel Holt's third failure to report according to mission schedule. The vehicle's signal remains strong at GARS 631AQ34. Shuttle launch from the surface was not expected for another five days. No further communications or corroborative tracking information have been received in Mission Control after that time. Mission Control has been unable to reach Pilot Takashi Shirogane and Payload Specialist Matthew S. Holt. We have no indication that these communication failures are arising out of technological issues; control reports do not indicate that this incident was caused by anything or anyone on the ground._

_As of today, the Kerberos Mission is being treated as a mishap due to pilot error. An investigation team is being assembled to confirm—_

# *

  
You wake.

You sleep.

You wake.

Close your eyes. Don't dream.

# *

  
You wake up.

Your name is Katherine Dwyer Holt, _Kate-Katie-Not-Your-Kitty-Darling_ , and you have a plan.

Your mom stays home all day, but she's not the one you need to trick, elbow-deep in disinfectant as she is, rags swiping the gleaming kitchen floor from morning to dusk. She's still scrubbing at some etched stain on the cupboard door when you snag a roll of quarters, when you slam the drawer and sail out the door in your old gingham dress and a backpack. You don't need her for this. The Garrison is fifteen bus stops and two miles away, but distance is no defense against you. You used to play forward when your brother played goalie; you know what it is to chase. Curving around the Garrison's wide grounds, you look for the snaggletoothed gap in the fence, and it's her step as much as yours, memory and instinct mixing as you wriggle through the break.

Katie Holt doesn't miss much.

Iverson's office window makes for a short trip from the fence. A grappling hook would've helped, but Katie knows the limits of her scrawny arms. In the decades since its rise, the Garrison's scarred over into well-worn steel, heavy with nooks and handholds. Katie plucks a knuckling rock from the soil. You climb, Katie's sharp eyes matched to your stubborn hands. Five levels up, a rock shatters the glass.

Ten minutes until the alarm triggers.

Iverson keeps his files in military order: rank and file, every name sorted to a knife-edge precision. And, like every creaking grey dinosaur born before the turn of the century, he copied his password to a sticky note and smudged it under his mousepad—as if anyone with half a brain wouldn't check for that kind of anachronism.

Your fingers weave across the keys, and you're in. Desktop, RDS client to the Garrison's primary database, password decryption. Five minutes and the Kerberos mission's unraveling before you: specifications, mission parameters, voyage data tracked up to August 12. Checkpoints reel by in constellated double-vision: Matthew Holt would've seen Mars's red dust, Jupiter's storms from the thin span of plexiglass. He could've smeared a thumb over its clouds. Shiro might have circled Saturn to let them gather pictures before they spun on to their ice extractions, a lazy fluid orbit like his worst semi-circles in the Red Arrow. Months in—he would've shucked his jacket over the cockpit chair, fanned fingers over the constellated control panels, alight with a galaxy's worth of flight. In the empty space, he would've smiled to himself like a secret, dreaming already of flights past the sunlit brink.

You're tapping at new commands when a creak trumpets through the door behind you. _Too soon, too soon_ —you jolt up, whirling.

Iverson only stares; his brows sag like dying cacti. "You," he says, tired, "again?"

" _Me_ ," you bite out, and it's your voice roiling with Katie's fury. Behind you the printer's coughing in a phlematic rage, spitting out a confession's worth of pages. "Nice coverup."

His mouth pinches. In a heartbeat, he's striding across the room—your whole frame grits and locks, readying, but he's eeling past you with a military man's sharp-angled precision to seize the pages drifting from the printer, shuffling the pages together. "These feeds are classified," he says, in a rough, smoke-stinging voice. "Forget the break-in—do you realise how many laws you're breaking by trying to access these?"

At once Katie's lunging for him, snatching at the pages, but Iverson twists to slide his desk between you, holding the sheaf out of reach. Memory bells you in an echo: your brother toppling onto his tiptoes to keep his model plane out of reach, tipping over the couch. You'd found tumbled onto the floor, glasses cracked but laughing—Katie's limbs tremble with it. "You're hiding something," she says, sharp and rising. "I looked through the data. The Kerberos Mission wasn't lost because of some malfunction or crew mistake! There's no evidence of a crash _anywhere_ in the—"

"I don't have to answer these questions," Iverson bites out, temper fit to boil viscera. "You're lucky that I'm not charging you for treason as is." He jabs a code into the wall's keypad, slams his open palm into the plaster before his eyes snap back to you.

_We'll take as long as you want_

Katie pieces it together faster than you do; as Iverson turns, she goes racing for the window, thinking of floorplans, the next open workstation. But his grip grinds over your shoulder, a brutal anchor. "Get her out of here," he's gritting to the door, and two soldiers cross his office threshold to seize her, a heavy hand manacling each arm before she's had a chance to _think_. They drag you out into the halls, despite your bristling, your kicking heels scrabbling linoleum and your long hair streaming in a wild banner. The corridors are crowding with cadets—Akira's narrow, sober judgment; Parminder and her rival bent to a shared flurry of whispers—but this is a different life.

"Shiro—Takashi Shirogane! Matthew Holt! Samuel Holt!" Your lungs swell even as the soldiers tow you on. Even a few instructors are turning, sharp-eyed on familiar names; gossip's already clouding over the stilled hall. "You know where they are, Iverson—you _know_ what you're saying out there's a lie!"

" _Stop_." Iverson's staring at you with blood in his eye; the soldiers turn back, and you pull yourself up, glaring all around. "Miss Holt," the commander says. He folds his hands behind his back—speaks with a cadence meant to be heard. "Believe me, I _am_ sorry for your loss. But we've already scheduled the release of the Kerberos Mission files. These files will more than show that there's nothing to hide. The mission was a grievous mishap—but it was an _accident_ , and one that we'll all have to live with." He cocks a glance at the guards to either side. "Escort Miss Holt off the premises and make sure every guard knows she's never allowed on Garrison property ever again."

Lies and bureaucracy, a government agency choking in its race to bury a murder—your veins are simmering fit to burst. Katie's narrow body's frailer than Akira's wiry muscle, stiffer than Parminder's pilot build—but it's _small_ , and your guards are sparing with your civilian bones in a way that they wouldn't bother for a cadet. It's advantage enough. You wrench forward, stumbling like some kind of amateur, drive _back_ with their momentum as their steps stutter to keep hold. An elbow plants into each soldier's gut with surgical exactitude, and then you're running, running. Four flights of stairs, winding and pounding with thunder trailing close beneath you. 

_Keith._

The rooftop lock rusted loose long ago, you remember. An elbowing burst along the metal and you're through, racing across the sanded, patchy concrete with guards trailing on your heels, only—

You know this place. You know its grey pebbling, the patches where the railing's worn to rust. Matt's lab lies one floor beneath, a workstation with open Internet access and a password that's never been changed. If you can just make it across the roof, ease down onto the gaping stone sill, you'll be in. It won't take you ten minutes this time.

"Miss Holt!" Iverson bawls through the stark, bleaching air. He's stopped feet away; his fists shake at his sides as his head braces high. Scared to move. "You don't want to do this—your father wouldn't want this for you!"

You're on the railing. Somehow you've already reached it, swung yourself over its shaking, rust-rasped iron—but that's an afterthought, a stopmotion sequence with only half the frames left in the reel. You're standing on the bar; your heels lock against the rust, teetering on the brink. Here and now, you aren't an acrobat—

But it's the memory that matters; here and now, what you can remember seems like an answer better than any chase or conspiracy. Someone'd hauled you up here once. Dark hair, bright eyes, lapels pinned with red brass panels. The salt-faint taste of his breath on your tongue. In the dusk he'd stiffened, uncertain as you swung to prop yourself up on the railing. _One of these days, you're going to fall._

 _Not as long as you're watching_ , you'd said, and you remember—

Katie's heel trembles along the bar. It gives way.

Iverson's roar sears the sky like thunder—but you're already twisting in the air, scrabbling for handholds that race and ribbon by. The empty wind flares open at your back like wings.

It's almost funny—this memory, this dream. All this time, and you'd never once thought to fly like this.

# *

  
You wake up—

Sensation floods back in a downpour: bones blaring and the air shrilling heavy, straining red-red-red down through your lungs, and overhead the lights go spinning, tendons unraveling from muscle and bone—you're choking with it, the weight of daylight and gravity and voices crowding voices, salt like a clean knife driving through the backs of your eyes—

And then it's gone, scrubbed mute in the instant that you bolt upright.

Your room's a tangled wreck—your wine-dark bed wide as a sea beneath an attic's blocky ceiling, reefed with pillows and sheets snarled like whirlpools. Shelves shoulder shelves across a vast stretch musty with old vanilla, and a stout cherrywood dresser sulks in its own low mouldering alcove, above a swamp of sweatshirts and paperbacks spilling across the worn floor: all the debris of a life richly lived.

Your name is Akira, but they won't call you that today.

_No._

You've got your palms clamped over your ears—balling into yourself as the air churns and chars with new silence. It's the storm you need to shut out, fury-exulting-fear and the adrenaline rush singing at the back of your skull. You ache all over, bruisy and lead-boned, your fingertips gritty from hanging onto the brink of a little flyer's windows, teetering on the brink of real flight, a real fall. _Impact_ —and every bone's shocked anew, thinking of _landing_ in the heartbeats before sensation blasts through you again, drowns you in the seeping-cracked ache of falling, falling, landing amid stars that whirl and burst through the cores of your marrows. You're rolling on rumpled blankets, across scraped-dry pavement, and your name is _Katherine Dwyer Holt—focus, Katie, focus: there are approximately 9,000,000 people living in Chicago, on average, there are two persons in each household in Chicago, roughly one household in twenty has a piano that is tuned regularly_ —breathing Fermi's estimations like nonsense as light wracks every grain of marrow in you, a swamping light that blooms in you fit to burst, and _it won't hurt as much if you focus, you have to concentrate_ , but your wrist's shaking and twitching against the woodgrain though there's no blood amid the splinters, just iron in your teeth, gasping as the cement smears down your back—

 _It wasn't your fault_.

Impact again—impact, too late. Bruises jar up your spine—you've tumbled from the bed, floorboards creaking with each rock and jolt of your body. "Honey?" It shrills outside your door, a vulture, a _voice_ , and you're trembling with the impact of a fall left a day and miles back.

 _Breathe in._ Tell the story. There's a living breach between the body you wear and the person you are: you know the separation to your core. Today you are in a girl's body. For as long as you've been doing this, you've never lingered, never changed. A new body every day.

_Sometimes acting's enough. What we do impacts other people. You can't ignore that._

—veins and viscera screaming, lungs straining through a tidal roar around you. A disaster chorus crying out: _Katie. Katie, please look at me—_ but you know yourself, you must know these slender new bones, this body whole in frame and tendon untolled by pain. You're a new life today, a separate person.

Your name is Katie-Matthew- _Holt._

You tumble back. Again, again: you arch and twist and wake, you remember—

# *

  
_Let's try the library today. I can download a few books for you to look at. Just keep them on your email, or a dropbox online, and you'll be able to access them no matter where you are._

Or: _Have you ever had mochi? Sorry to write twice in one day, but I keep thinking about it, meaning to ask you. Then I see you, and somehow, I just forget. They're pretty sweet, but some of the angriest people I've known put five sugars in their coffee. I figure it's worth trying a few times—that way, maybe, you'll be able to decide if it's something_ you _like or dislike, and not just the body you're in._

And: _We need to start coming up with a signal for when you're around. It's getting strange—I'm almost-seeing you all over the place. The way someone looks at me when they're asking a question. How Parminder still says_ kidding _the same way you did. I think you improved Akira's flying, too—the higher-ups're saying he's heading for cargo pilot next year. You only spent a day with him—but I thought you'd want to know that. You try hard to live their lives for a day, and they may not know you were there. But somewhere inside, they remember what you learned for them. Sometimes you do change people, Keith, and it's for the better._

And later, last, always: _I know it's too early to start thinking about this—but have you ever thought about flying out to space?_

# *

  
_Keith_.

Your skin's salt-grained; your eyes dazzle and ache around the rims. You're in a body with living parents today, a pair of office workers who live like mice in their own house, whispering and scuttling, acting out their private miseries in the floors beneath you. You don't have to talk to them. Maybe you've never needed to do anything.

 _Steady._ You snap up some shining screen, batter your way through a ballpoint password to an account that this body won't remember tomorrow. Habit shapes character, an everyday kind of alchemy. Every day, you read this page, scroll down, change your password; every day, it means, you log in to a part of the cloud no one knows but you, to check that your files are still there. Every day, you choose just one pixel-stitched shot; you listen to the pitch of his shallow breath beneath the engine. The twitch of his brows sweeping down. His teeth and tongue shaping your name. Over and over, you go back to him, all the artifacts scattered between you that prove your history, prove that he once lived.

Stop. _Focus._ Listen to yourself. There's a reason you're still thinking. Cast memory back—remember his spiraling calluses, his long fingers unfaltering on the wheel.

They say that the Kerberos mission's been lost, but the records show that they're still sending out a probe confirmation. You'll have other days; you can wait for the transmission. He must have left some trace, some sign. Whatever he sends back'll be for the mission, but he'll have a word to spare for you. He'd know that you're watching the way he knew your flying once; you know each other down to the core.

_You're the most self-possessed person I know, Keith._

Your eyes stutter, salt gritting beneath the lids. You slam an elbow into plaster—the dusty _crack_ bruises the blur from your vision. _Stop_. 

If you rest, you'll wake. Every day, you wake up in a new body. A new name and a new life. Turning and turning, the center cannot hold. You have to remember yourself; you have to remember—

Your name is Keith.

Your fingers rattle over a keyboard. How long have you been reading this single line? Minutes. Seconds. Hours and heartbeats and days. Time slips by in grains and deserts—how would you know the difference? Your hands are grey-plump-gold, vined with veins; your fingers twitch with a spider's shivering, black over white. Your name—

 _Katie,_ she'd whispered over the blip and murmur of the cardiac monitor, salt-coarsened and deep, impatience charred bare by grief. _Katie, I know I haven't—been there for you since the mission. Believe me—I know. There's so much that I could've done for you—so much that I will do. Together. We can—we must make it through. Both of us. You're a fighter, Katie. You survive; you're like your father that way. You don't—please. Please, I can't do this. I can't keep talking to you without knowing if you can hear it, pretending that there's an alternative to seeing you wake up. Please, Katie, don't go—please come back—_

Don't rest. You can't. He'll come back. He'll come, and you'll fix the rest together. You have to hold onto that. You have to hold on. You have to.

Close your eyes. Breathe: in and out, in and hold: the summer-dusk reek of him, diner grease and soap and engine oil. Soon you'll exhale; soon he'll be gone from you, too.

Your name is Yaroslav Kudrinsky. Your name is Parminder Cole. Your name is Teresa-Tom-Fritzen-Kaur, with roping silvery hair and a taste for cherries soaked in Amaretto Sours and your grandmother's dogtags chained around your throat, _his broad shoulders and the tuft of hair that sways between his eyes_ , gangling legs and mail-order sneakers, _his fingertips drawing friction down your wrist like sunrays_ , your raggedy nails well-worn into the habit of flicking chess pieces across a checkered board and—

_Please, Shiro._

Your lungs ache; your eyelids burn. 

Hold. Hold. Hold.

Your name is. Your name. You—

# *

  
You wake up. 

**Author's Note:**

> fic concept pinched from _every day_ by david levithan, along with two or three of the expository lines. the garrison's report was straight-up cobbled out of old nasa announcements. pidge's fermi babble at the end was an example snagged from the [language log](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1396#more-1396) @ upenn. if you're particularly curious about my exact borrowings, i'm happy to source.
> 
> i've read for errors but may have missed things. please help me correct any egregiousness; i will in fact be grateful!


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